Chapter 11: The Fall, Part 2
The bowl struck the wall, breaking apart into hot shards of porcelain that pattered against the floor like giant hailstones, interspersed with steaming globs of porridge. Remus didn't even flinch.
"Let's try and discuss this separation amicably. Like adults."
"Fuck you."
Tonks seized the empty mug from the floor and stood up to fling it across the room, yearning for the fleeting release of the smash even as she knew nothing could slake her outrage; nothing could pacify the furious beating of her heart, so rapid it felt as though it could erupt from her chest and fly at his face. She rubbed away the thick stream under her nose with a sleeve and glared down at Remus.
"How can you do this to me? How can you just give up?"
"I've explained myself to you already. I have to do what's right - "
"Only your warped sense of morality would tell you that ditching me and our baby is the right thing to do! Why is it that whenever you get on your high horse and spout off about duty, it's always when you're about to do something absolutely despicable?"
She started pacing: her knees knocking, her hands worrying at her hair, her throat parched, her cheeks and chest hot with raised blood; trying not to look at the ring, sitting so small and silent on the table at the back of the room.
"I'm not asking you to be a hero or to become the perfect dad overnight, I'm asking you to try. I'm asking you to stay with me, like you bloody well vowed you would. I'm asking you to be the man I married, not this loveless bag of bones, not this monster ripping out my heart with no full moon in sight."
She stopped suddenly, her dad's long cardigan swaying.
"The kids will see right through you, you know. They're not stupid. What lie are you planning on telling them? How will you explain why you've left me behind?"
"I'll tell them the truth. That you'll be safe. That you'll be with your parents."
Tonks scoffed, blowing strands of yellow hair away from her mouth. "They'll send you packing within five minutes. They won't want some deadbeat dad tagging along with them. You'll only be a burden."
Remus shook his head. "No. They'll be grateful for my help. Besides, it's what James and Lily would want - "
"Oh, spare me 'what James and Lily would want'! Don't use your dead friends as an excuse."
"You never knew them," Remus interrupted her, his voice clipped and sharp. "You don't have the right to comment on what they - "
"Maybe not, but I knew Sirius. What do you think Sirius would say if he was here?"
"Sirius wouldn't be here. Sirius would already be at Harry's side, protecting his godson - "
"Sirius would call you a pathetic cunt for leaving me and a heartless fraud for trying to justify it. That's if he even recognised this pitiful imitation of Remus Lupin as his friend. Your self-obsession and cruelty would make him sick."
The sinews in Remus' neck tightened, but his voice remained quiet and controlled. "Would you like to know what he'd say to you, Tonks?
She crossed her arms tight, her nostrils flaring, but didn't reply.
"That you're better off without me."
"You know what, Remus?"
He'd be fucking right.
Remus stared up at her, waiting for her to speak the words he seemed to know were being screamed inside her head, but Tonks swallowed them and began pacing again; clutching at her head as if to try and catch a clear thought from the jungle inside. Somewhere buried deep, something was telling her not to play into his hands, that he didn't mean the vileness he was spewing at her, that he wasn't well - but louder by far was the chorus that clamoured to retaliate, to soak him in the blood of her wounds.
"You were right to call me fucking stupid last night. Because I am, aren't I? Only a proper doormat would have forgiven you for dumping me the first time around. Only a truly naive pinhead would have taken you back so easily. Just one eloquent little speech and that was that. You never fought for me, not really - not like I fought for you. Dad told me I deserved better than someone who'd hurt me like that, Mum told me you had a good reason for rejecting me, Bill told me you were too damaged…but did I listen? No, of course I bloody didn't - I was too blindly loyal for that. I didn't even listen to you. You, the person who gave me more reasons than anyone not to trust you, a whole litany of warnings, a gigantic clanging set of alarm bells…"
As she spoke, Remus' head inclined ever so slightly. He was agreeing with her, drinking in her words, unsurprised by them - but Tonks couldn't stop.
"And still I got down on my silly little knees and proposed to you. I thought you'd be worth it. I thought we'd be happy together. But instead…instead…it's like our first dance was on quicksand and I never noticed, but you did - and you're only telling me about it now, now that I've been sucked in ankle deep. You can berate me for semantics, for every time I've put my foot in my mouth, but at least I've given this relationship my all which is more than I can say about you. I've tried so hard. So hard. And for what? For you to just leave me all over again? For a grand total of four weeks of marriage? You've bent me out of shape and now you're breaking me. You're BREAKING me, Remus," she fought for breath, her own shout ringing in her ears. "I've never known happiness like the happiness I've felt with you…but I've never known such bloody wretched misery either."
"Wouldn't you like to be free of that misery, Tonks?"
Tonks stopped again and pointed a finger at him. "Don't you dare talk to me about freedom. I'm the one up the duff, not you. You want to waltz out of here and leave me, my belly swelling with your baby - your baby that I'll have to grow and birth and feed and love all by myself - and you have the nerve to call that setting me free?" Tonks stepped closer to the sofa. "I bet you're incapable of seeing it like that, aren't you? Because that would make it harder for you to wallow in your own precious subjugation, wouldn't it?"
"I'll feel the shame of what I've done every second that remains to me."
Tonks followed Remus' downturned gaze to the fingers tightly laced in his lap: the sight of them - the anxious tips, that had learned so quickly how to love her, pressing white onto the hands that had caressed fireworks into her skin a hundred times, leading to the slender arms that had pinned her so gently to the wall upstairs - sent a ripple of bitter fury pulsing through her.
"You and your shame. Where was all that shame the day before yesterday? And the day before that? In fact, where was it for the shag in question? Conveniently absent."
"It was there," said Remus in a hoarse whisper, his whole body tensing up. "It was always there…"
Tonks tore off her cardigan. A velvet dress strap drooped off her naked shoulder. She was breathing hard, her chest surging over the low neckline, one hand squeezing the material covering her lower stomach. She threw words at him like weapons, her eyes scouring his face for a reaction; for any sign of life from the automaton that was now her husband.
"Oh really? Fucking me was so morally disgusting to you, was it? The dirty sacrifice of all your lofty principles? My body's not a battleground for your conscience, Remus. Our baby's sprung out of love, not out of failure or guilt - it's an accident, not a mistake. You've got to take responsibility. You've got to share this with me."
She reached out, wanting to take his hand and press it to her unformed bump, but he pushed the sofa backwards with his feet, inching past her and striding across the room. Tonks skidded in front of him, placing her body between him and the door.
"I know what you're trying to do," she said quickly. "You're trying to force me to kick you out willingly by hurting me until I snap, but I won't let the worst of you win. You might have made me hate you but you'll never stop me…never stop me…"
Her tongue didn't want to form the shapes, but Tonks closed her eyes, hauling from her depths an unthinkable strength: a strength that belied her cracked, weeping heart; her exhausted, changing body.
"…loving you," she finished. "It's not too late. We can still salvage this. We can still create a home, if you just stay."
"A home?" Remus' voice shook and his eyes were suddenly wild. "What home? You don't have the slightest idea what you're trying to commit yourself to, do you? You know nothing of what it really means to live a werewolf's life. You never have. You never could. All you've ever known is a life perfectly within your own control: a cosy upbringing as the centre of your parents' world, a respected career path, a body that obeys your every whim… But as the mother of a werewolf, nothing will be in your control. You'll have to put your baby in a cage every month, ignoring its cries for you, hearing it shriek with a pain no child should ever have to suffer. Your love for your child will be indistinguishable from your horror at the fate bestowed upon it. Do you honestly think you'll be able to stand sharing your bed with me, the beast responsible? The hatred you feel for me now will pale in comparison to the loathing you'll feel for me then. All this whilst the war rests in the hands of an inexperienced boy, every day bringing slaughter closer to our door. Is that your vision for our wonderful family life? Is that the safe, loving home of your dreams?"
Remus stepped around her. Trembling, her arms cradling her ribs, Tonks turned to see him stop by the door, his face dreadful and expressionless once more.
"You won't need to bother with a divorce," he said. "A marriage to a werewolf can simply be annulled. Like it never happened."
There was a clap like thunder and every window in the house cracked. The panes split first into fissures and then shattered. Tiny pieces of glass formed into shoals and engulfed them both.
"Tonks! Stop!"
But, like a child, she couldn't: the shock was leaving her in waves. The bones of the house shuddered as branches plunged through the empty window frames, the trees pressing in on the very room itself. The glass flew faster and faster, making tiny nicks in Remus' robes and slicing at Tonks' bare arms which blossomed with tiny beads of blood. Remus was shouting something, coming closer through the storm, but Tonks couldn't think, could only feel.
"You're only hurting yourself! Stop it!"
He shielded her with his arms. She stared up into his face, dizzy with simultaneous disgust and yearning, and the whirling stopped. Their chests touched, their heartbeats pounding out of time, as Remus muttered under his breath to heal her shallow cuts, her blood smudging under his fingertips.
"Please," she whispered.
He was too close to hide. She saw his lips quiver at the word.
"Please don't leave."
"It's time to let me go," he said softly, and his eyes had never looked so terrible nor so beautiful as he added, "I think you're ready to."
The words scratched her throat on their way out. "This is your home. I'm your home."
"There is no home for me."
Tonks gasped, but no tears fell; she'd used them all up. "You'll…never stop…being my husband…"
"In name only - "
"No, no," she moaned, tipping her head onto his chest. "Body and soul. Forever."
"No marriage is forever, Tonks," she heard him say, near her ear. "The vows we took only last until death."
She was limp, too weak to move, as he turned from her and walked towards the door. Her socks had fused to the floorboards, rooting her to the spot, so she could only call after him.
"If you walk out that door, I'll never forgive you."
He paused, his hand raised to the handle.
"I swear, I'll never take you back."
The impossible happened so fast Tonks barely processed it until she heard the faint click of the lock as Remus shut the door behind him. She stared at the empty space he'd left behind, as if his shape could reform itself from the air. Then she watched herself, as if from above, crouch and fumble in the pockets of her cardigan; cross the room and wrench open the door; burst out into the morning, the dew of the forest floor chilling her feet as she fled in pursuit. Halfway to the apparition boundary, Tonks stopped dead. Standing on the brink, Remus turned slowly to face her.
There was not even the slightest trace of shock on his face to see her pointing her wand at his chest.
Tonks didn't understand it. The earth below them should have been revolting into flames, the trees should have been cleaving themselves in two, the sky itself should have come tearing down upon their heads in witness to such a fall, but instead the forest was still.
She stared at the tip of her wand as if she'd never seen it before. It was shaking. She dropped her arm and the wand slipped from her fingers, landing noiselessly among the nettles. She took what she knew would be her last look at him and spoke the only words she had for a goodbye.
"I had so much faith in you."
"I know."
Remus turned on the spot and was gone.